My day in Beijing

All I can start off by saying is wow… take everyday life in the US, and turn it completely upside-down and that’s Beijing.

Our driver picked us up as soon as we got through customs and picked up our luggage at 6am. It was a calm, sort of, half an hour ride to the hotel JW Marriot.
We got to our hotel and we finally got to shower! I felt so nasty after my two flights totaling over 17 hours. our hotel room is very nice. We ate breakfast and left the hotel at 8am and met up with Richard who works for the China National Winter Sport Management Center and for the Chinese Ice Hockey Association. He and his wife Claire, and the driver Leo took us to all of the places I will talk about in this blog. Richard is good friends with Matt Leaf and acted as our “tour guide” throughout the day. He spoke pretty good English, but at times we had to have him repeat himself and or just nod and act like we understood him.

So we all jumped into the van and all I can say about driving around China is people drive like crazy here! They don’t use turn signals at all… EVER. They constantly cut each other off and almost run people over. The pedestrians here are expected to yield to cars, there are no cross walks and the cars honk at each other constantly. There are a lot of people on bicycles and there are a ton of public buses. Tomorrow is a designated day that no one can drive cars in Beijing except for taxi drivers. It’s to “help” cut down pollution in the city.

We drove 40 minutes away and finally ended up at the foot of the mountains. Cutting across the mountains is the Great Wall of China. The Great Wall of China was amazing! I remember seeing a picture of it in a text book growing up, never did I think that I would one day get to actually walk on it. The pictures that Kate, Stacey, and I took don’t do it justice. It was so beautiful with the backdrop of all the mountains. It was a very exhausting climb, our legs were shaking at the end because the stairs were so steep, but I think every step was worth it. We think we walked a mile of the wall in our 2 hour walk. After taking many pictures and taking in how amazing the site was, we had to leave. (By the way I have posted my photos on picasaweb) We walked out and down the road to get to where the car was parked and we almost got run over, don’t worry we are ok but I don’t want to get that close to a car again!

After the Great wall, we went to the Ming Tomb in the underground palace. It was kind of cool, but I think we should have gone to the Great Wall last because it was by far was the coolest thing we saw all day. Claire bought a bag full of fruit from a farm lady and offered it to us. We said no at first but we found out we didn’t have to eat the peel (it was definitely not washed). Richard pronounced it as “Shir-ztha”. It looked kind of like an orange rotting tomato. Now when I say rotting, I’m not talking about mold and stuff, it just looked like a smushy tomato that got left on the ground for a while. It was sweet tasting and had a jelly like consistency. She popped off the top of the vine stubs for us and we squeezed it out the top and ate it. Claire ate 3, but I couldn’t finish a whole one. I don’t like jelly. So I haven’t even reached the highlight of our day, we needed to use the bathroom so when we found one, we opened the stall and there it was… The Squatty Potty. It is a hole in the ground; wait let me rephrase that, a nasty stinky hole in the ground. No toilet paper, we were pre-warned by someone who went last year and brought our own along with hand sanitizer. They have sinks but of course no soap. That was definitely an experience I don’t want to deal with again, but unfortunately I heard that the rink and some of the other venues are nothing but squatty potty heaven.

Enough toilet talk, now that you maybe feel a little sick to your stomach let me tell you what I ate for lunch! We went to a restaurant in some part of the city, when we walked in everyone was staring at us. We got seated and Richard asked us what we wanted. We didn’t know, we said rice and joked about how we were vegetarians for the two weeks we were here. So he ordered for us and we started with a first course of ducks feet and rice. Kate and I tried the duck feet, it was chewy and the texture was all but appetizing. The really nasty part about the duck feet is, the toes were still webbed and the bones were still in it. Leo was popping them in his mouth like it was popcorn. Gross! I had pig intestine too. That was pretty good, a little chewy but it was cooked in a tasty sauce with peppers. We had soup, veggies, dumplings, and chicken which still had the head on it.

After our foreign food adventure which I am still feeling swimming around in my stomach we went to the Forbidden City, and Tienanmen Square. The Forbidden City was closed when we got there but we figured it was just a bunch of buildings and we took a few pictures. We walked to the Tienanmen Square in a huge crowd of people; there were a couple of shady looking guys walking behind us so we avoided them. We got tired after walking around for a while and went back to our hotel.

Now we are all sharing pictures and writing in our blogs and just relaxing before we go to bed. I’m sorry if any of what I wrote doesn’t make sense or is repetitive, I’m really tired and about to go crash on my bed. Tomorrow we leave for Harbin at 8:30am and will have more interesting stories. Stay tuned!